Throwing the Curse of the Holocaust Denier

Throwing the Curse of the Holocaust Denier

For many (or some) of us that were subject to intensive Holocaust conditioning as kids in American public schools, we saw films of hundreds and thousands of piled bodies from old WWII footage a few times a year - year in, year out. We were told they were Jews that had been murdered, gassed mostly, by the Nazis. I recall seeing my first one of these films in the early 1970’s when I was about nine or ten years old.

It went on for my entire education in the Boston area and then in high school in Columbia, Md. when my family had moved. In 1978 when the NBC television miniseries “Holocaust” was required watching for my social studies class, it seemed perfectly natural that we were expected to sit through four nights of television that even Elie Wiesel called “untrue, offensive, cheap.”

As a kid, I always felt a little sledgehammered after being subjected to those movies in the darkened classroom, surrounded by my fellow students with the teacher sitting in the back to keep an eye on us to make sure we didn’t fool around or otherwise be distracted from the Important Information that was being injected into our still-forming minds. Dark rooms under veil of authority are very conducive to making certain that attention is given to what’s to be taken in.

What was being funneled into our brains was a steady diet of grainy black and white movies of Jews being herded through towns like cattle, bodies being bulldozed into pits, mass trench shootings, prisoners that looked like the walking dead, emaciated corpses piled like firewood. If you had a similar experience in school, you know of what I speak. Then there was usually some kind of after-lesson given by the teacher when we were at our most traumatized. Bad Nazis. Nice teacher.

And we all took it in, without question. Six million Jews died in gas chambers, were made into soap, burned in ovens. Four million Jews died in Auschwitz. Nazis made lampshades out of Jewish skin. Gas chambers in Germany. And thus was the core of my childhood education of the Holocaust. I never questioned what I’d been taught. I had no reason to. Leaving any idea of academia behind in 1980 when high school was over, I went along with my merry little life and to be honest, I didn’t think much about the Holocaust again.

That changed for me in the late 1990’s when I learned, via the internet and my own research afterwards, that the number of dead at Auschwitz had been revised downward from four million to one million, but the overall six million Jewish dead still stood as gospel. Or maybe five million as of now. It was six million no questions asked when I was a kid.

Anyway, over time I also learned that the soap stories had been deprecated, Jews hadn’t been made into lampshades after all and there hadn’t really been any gas chambers on German soil. Having to unlearn this new information was coupled with learning that people were being charged with and going to jail for having the wrong opinion about history when it came to the Holocaust by publicly stating that there was no evidence for mass exterminations of Jews by gas chamber.

Frankly, life was easier before the blinders came off. What had all of these people done to the Holocaust stories of my youth?

We all know what a gas chamber is. It can be defined. We know them from 1930’s gangster flicks, Perry Mason shows, etc. For better or worse, gas chambers have been a meme for decades, even before World War Two. The first person executed by gas chamber in the US was a native born Chinese named Gee Jon in 1924. The last person executed by gas chamber in the US was in 1999, a German national named Walter LaGrand. Life’s funny like that.

It’s difficult to find a hard and fast definition of the term holocaust denial, though the term is used on a daily basis in the international media. As an aside that might have meaning or not, a google search for gas chamber yields fewer results than a google search for holocaust denial. I’ll leave it to the reader to pull that one apart.

So is there evidence of mass extermination of Jews by gas chamber? There’s much eyewitness and anecdotal evidence. There’s Yankel Wiernik’s “A Year In Treblinka”, published in 1945. In it, he claims that 1200 people were put into rooms that were about 400 square feet and gassed. This displays one of the difficulties of anecdotal evidence. Fitting 1200 people in what is essentially a small garage is a little difficult to imagine.

The most approachable analysis I’ve found is David Cole’s “The Truth Behind The Gates Of Auschwitz” (Part I, Part II). Cole’s Forty-Six Important Unanswered Questions Regarding the Nazi Gas Chambers is also helpful. In it, he asks the simply legitimate question, “If you don’t know whether there were three or four holes, how do you know that there were ANY holes?” It should be noted that Cole, who is Jewish, was apparently forced by threat and blackmail by the Jewish Defense League into recanting his research and withdrawing from ever speaking of the Holocaust again.

A quiz:

1. How many Chinese died in World War Two?
2. How many Russians died in World War Two?
3. How many Americans died in World War Two?
4. How many Jews died in World War Two?

You most likely know the answer to #4 without having to look it up. Most of us would have to look up the other answers too. I guess it was more important for us to learn some things rather than others.

It took me until a couple of years ago to realize that our conditioning is so deep that when the programmed individual is asked to consider what evidence exists for gas chambers, what the programmed individual hears is, “No Jews were killed by the Nazis”. That’s exactly how the programming is supposed to work. It makes possible the use of the term ‘Holocaust denier’ to keep the unconditioned sheep out of the fold.

In High American Culture of the 21st Century, there’s few greater curses thrown than that of “Holocaust Denier”. It’s gotten people deported and jailed in foreign countries while multi-billion ripoff artists are sentenced to their mansions.

This conditioning is often protected through an emotional reaction. Many people get downright angry when gas chambers and evidence are brought up in the same sentence. We see this same reaction in people that have an overarching attachment to religious or political systems also. It’s not a rational, reasoned reaction to a rational, reasonable request. For others, the reaction is one of apathy. Apathy protects the conditioning by ensuring that the source of the conditioning won’t be examined and thus, the conditioning remains.

This Holocaust conditioning is the vicegrip of a perception that lends itself to much evil being allowed to happen. By at least examining what one thinks one does or doesn’t know about the Holocaust, that grip is broken just a little bit and perception can be allowed to change rather than dictated to.

“In forging their own brand of totalitarianism in the U.S., the Zionists continue to manipulate the victims of the Nazi holocaust as their chief weapon.” - Alfred Lilienthal

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One Fed-up Reserve

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One Fed-up Reserve



The way Ron Paul tells it, his more than 30 years of speaking and writing about money, inflation, and the Federal Reserve System attracted only limited interest outside libertarian and constitutionalist circles. The subject, and Paul as its spokesman, were scarcely to be found in the media, even—or perhaps especially—on the business networks.

But Paul’s 2008 presidential bid changed that. Suddenly the Fed was on the table for discussion for the first time since Congress established it in 1913. With Paul making the evils of central banking and fiat money a theme of his campaign, the issue took on a vigor that few expected. Even calling for the Fed’s outright abolition was longer unheard of on the television news networks.

When Paul first raised the issue in his campaign, he had no idea what he was tapping into. “I didn’t realize people your age knew so much about money and inflation,” he told a rally at the University of Pittsburgh last year. “But it gets the largest applause at college campuses. I figured the first time it happened [at the University of Southern California] it was an accident. … But then at the University of Michigan, they started to burn Federal Reserve Notes.”

To Paul’s surprise, some of his loudest applause lines involved salvos against the Fed. Chants of “End the Fed!” greeted his denunciations of the economic damage the central bank was unleashing. An underappreciated reason for Paul’s fundraising prowess was his outspoken opposition to the Fed, a subject that had long been off limits in American politics. Eventually, a national organization called End the Fed, with local chapters around the country, gave institutional expression to the issue, sponsoring a series of demonstrations against the central bank in 39 cities last November.

This is a new phenomenon on the Right. The libertarian and conservative think tanks that liberally invoke the names of Austrian School economists like F.A. Hayek have tended to ignore these men’s opposition to central banking, a position too politically incorrect even for those who pride themselves on their willingness to defend unpopular positions. The Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education have been among the handful of exceptions to this rule, providing the scholarly infrastructure to convert what was sometimes an inchoate unease about the Fed among Paul supporters into well-honed arguments.

Unlike in the past, moreover, commentators with high media profiles now defend this view of money and central banking. Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, may be the best known of these. Schiff foretold the crisis before it happened, including the bankruptcy of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. His books Crash Proof and The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets, both of which have sold well, take an Austrian approach to current conditions. A grassroots movement is even trying to draft Schiff, a resident of Connecticut, to run for U.S. Senate against Chris Dodd in 2010.

Schiff isn’t alone. Famed investor Jim Rogers calls for the abolition of the Fed when he’s a guest on business networks. Indeed, he predicts the Fed’s demise sometime in the next ten years. Another Austrian analyst all over television and the print media is James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. Similarly high-profile is Mish Shedlock, whose Global Economic Trend Analysis blog takes a reliably anti-Fed position.

It’s not surprising that arguments against the Fed are finally resonating. Since the crisis began in 2007, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has engaged in all manner of emergency activity, much of it unprecedented and of such dubious legality that even some of those who may reject or be unfamiliar with arguments against the Fed have begun to wonder about the unaccountable power this institution wields over the economy.

For example, John Hussman of Hussman Funds accused the Fed of going beyond its legal boundaries when it offered a $30 billion “non-recourse loan” to J.P. Morgan, which was secured by the worst of Bear Stearns’s mortgage debt. The Fed is supposed to provide liquidity to the banking system or shore up the solvency of a non-bank institution. This loan was neither. J.P. Morgan was in no financial trouble: it was “effectively offered a subsidy by the Fed at public expense.”

Shedlock is even more blunt: “The Fed simply does not care whether its actions are illegal or not. The Fed is operating under the principle that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. And forgiveness is just another means to the desired power grab it is seeking.”

The most significant argument against the Fed, though, is not political but economic. The Austrian view is that a central bank is not merely unnecessary but harmful. There is no need for a monopoly institution, by means of artificial money creation, to prevent the natural and healthy phenomenon of falling prices. There is likewise no need for a “lender of last resort” for the banking industry any more than for the personal computer industry or the shellfish industry. As long as the banking system is run on sound principles—an unlikely outcome, while there is a central bank with powers to prop up unsound banks—there is no reason for the bankruptcy of one or two major banks to provoke a systemic crisis, as can happen under the Fed system.

Then there are the problems that stem from artificial money creation. Not only do people on fixed incomes suffer from the rising prices that increases in the money supply bring about, but the process of money creation inevitably enriches politically well-connected groups at the expense of everyone else. The powerful are in a position to receive the newly created money first and spend it before prices have commensurately risen. Still other problems are discussed in the major Austrian treatments of money, including Mises’s Human Action and Murray Rothbard’s The Case Against the Fed.

Under a commodity standard, people could save for the future by accumulating gold and silver coins. The coins’ value appreciated over time because of their natural increase in purchasing power, as the relatively slow increase in the production of precious metals was outpaced by the much faster increase in the production of other goods and services. Today, only a fool would try to save for the future by piling up dollar bills. Everyone is forced to enter the financial markets, which are risky even for knowledgeable investors, in order to prevent the value of his retirement savings from vanishing before his eyes.

Austrian business cycle theory, which Paul has made a point of explaining, blames the central bank for the boom-bust cycle. (And yes, it can also account for financial panics that occurred before the Fed was established.) Under fiat money, currency without commodity backing, the central bank can artificially lower interest rates by increasing the supply of money—and thus the funds banks have available to lend—through the banking system. This is supposed to stimulate the economy. What it actually does is mislead investors into embarking on investments that the artificially low rates seem to validate but that cannot be sustained under existing economic conditions. Unprofitable investments are made to seem profitable, and over time the result is the squandering of untold resources in lines of investment that should never have been begun.

If lower interest rates are the result of increased saving by the public, those greater saved resources provide the means with which to see the additional investment through to completion. But the situation is very different when lower interest rates result from the Fed’s creation of new money out of thin air. In that case, lower rates do not reflect an increase in the pool of savings from which investors can draw. Fed tinkering, in other words, does not increase the real stuff in the economy. The additional investment that the lower rates encourage therefore leads the economy down a path that is not sustainable.

That is how the Austrians knew the present bust was coming. The preceding boom had been based not on real factors but on bubble conditions created by the Fed’s artificial credit expansion. It had to end in a bust, as Mises and Hayek said. That’s also what they said in 1928 and 1929, as respectable opinion hastened to assure everyone that business cycles were a thing of the past.

To be sure, while the Fed is slowly but surely becoming an issue for discussion in politics and the media, as yet only a small segment of the population opposes—or indeed knows much about—the central bank. But because this issue is one about which most Americans are lethargic or uninformed, that small and growing segment can influence public life on a scale out of proportion to its numbers. And the presence of this once-excluded point of view makes it harder for the regime to pretend that economic crises have no cause, that no person or institution is to blame for them, and that the federal government and its central bank have the solutions.

Paul is said to be finishing a book on the Federal Reserve for 2009 release. If it should become a bestseller, the profile of the anti-Fed campaign will be raised still higher.

The End the Fed movement likewise is pressing forward. Organizer Steven Vincent says the group is coordinating a series of rallies in 40 cities on April 25, to be followed by an event at the National Press Club at which they will present the fruits of their nationwide petition campaign in support of Congressman Paul’s Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act.

As the economic crisis continues to worsen, it will become harder and harder to portray old-school Keynesianism as “change,” and the potential audience for the Austrian message will only grow. That, one hopes, is a silver lining to the disaster the Fed has unleashed.

Weep not for Gaza but the cat

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Weep not for Gaza but the cat



AMSTERDAM, Jan 9 (IPS) - On the phone from Gaza, Zahrah Salem shares the news she has just seen, that so many at the White House were “deeply saddened” by the death of the cat India Willie (see picture above). Why, she asks, is nobody at the White House deeply saddened by the death of so many children in Gaza.

After a pause she says, “At least the cat did not die hungry, like the children in Gaza.”

Zahrah Salem, 64, has four children and 15 grandchildren to worry about. Day after day of bombing brings blessing they are still there. “We all sleep in one room,” she says. “So if we die, we die together. What if we die and the children don’t, we don’t want to leave them behind to suffer.”

These days the injuries suffered by this IPS correspondent at the hands of the Israelis on trying to return home to Gaza seem trivial in the face of what is going on in Gaza. And in the face of the fears over the fate of family and friends back home.

From the comfort of a hospital in Amsterdam, thoughts seem focussed day and night on survivors, on who might perhaps be in hospital in Gaza – lucky enough to make it to hospital, lucky enough perhaps to be still there. And on what a very different place a hospital in Gaza can be from one in Amsterdam.


“We do not receive patients, we receive remains,” says Ahmed Abdelrahman, a staff nurse at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The sound of ambulance sirens screams into the phone as we speak. “It is a job sometimes to put limbs together in the morgue, to find out which body part belongs to who.”

Staff risk their lives to save the injured. “We have been shot at many times as we evacuate injured people or collect bodies,” says Abdelrahman. “I have as we speak eight calls from the east side from people who are bleeding, including two women. But our ambulance crew was fired on by the Israelis as they went to help.”

Dr. Mawia Hassanien, head of emergency services at Shifa Hospital says at least 12 emergency workers have been killed and 32 injured. Eleven ambulances have been destroyed.

The injured who are brought to hospital successfully find little treatment possible. The Egyptian authorities have opened the Rafah crossing briefly on a few occasions to allow in medical supplies. But that is a small fraction of what Gaza needs.

Many in Gaza, including Hamas members, say they do not know what to do to stop this. Some scattered groups not under Hamas control continue to fire rockets into Israel. These rockets have killed four and injured 40, and spread serious anxiety among Israelis in Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba, Sderot and some other towns in western Negev.

But the rockets are only an excuse for Israel to destroy the Palestinian structure, Gazans say. An Israeli military spokesman has said the Israeli Defence Forces trained for the attack 18 months at a model of the main city on a desert army base. “Our soldiers know all the back streets where the targets are,” he said.

Abu Ghasam, 42, of Buriej refugee camp, says he cannot understand the Israeli assault, and “why the people being killed are the civilians here, and not the ones launching the rockets.”

Ghasam, father of six, has little time to worry about these questions, though. His main concern is to use a few hours of ceasefire to buy bread for his children. He usually finds bakeries closed. For the safe, hunger is now becoming a greater problem, by the hour.

Zahrah Salem knew people close by who have been killed. She can see the mourning tents. “But I am afraid to go and pay condolences,” she says. “The Israeli planes are hitting us everywhere.”

She can hear them again and again, and she can hear the bombs and missiles come screaming down. But she does not close the window. If the bomb just misses you, there will be the glass splinters.

Israel; making basket cases of Gaza's children

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Israel; making basket cases of Gaza's children

The International Committee of the Red Cross has accused the Israeli military of "unacceptable" conduct and breaching international humanitarian law after discovering four emaciated children living next to the corpses of their mothers and other adults in bomb-shattered houses in Gaza City.

The ICRC said that it had spent four days seeking Israeli guarantees of safe passage so that it could gain access to the houses in the badly damaged Zaytun neighbourhood of the city. It was finally allowed to send in a rescue team and four Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulances yesterday afternoon and said today that what they found was shocking.

In one house they discovered four small children, alive but too weak to stand, next to the bodies of their dead mothers. In all their were 12 dead bodies lying on mattresses.

In another house they found 15 survivors of the Israeli bombardment, several of them wounded, and in a third, three corpses. At that point they were ordered to leave by Israeli soldiers manning a post some 80 metres away, but they refused to do so.

The children and the wounded had to be taken to the ambulances by donkey cart because earth walls erected by the Israeli army made it impossible to bring the vehicles close enough to the houses. In all, the rescue team removed 18 wounded and 12 others who were extremely exhausted. It took away two corpses and plans to return to fetch 13 more tomorrow.

The ICRC said that it believed there were more wounded sheltering in the ruins of other houses in the same neighbourhood, and in an unusually robust public statement issued by the organisation's Geneva headquarters it demanded that the Israeli military grant it immediate access to search for them.

"This is a shocking incident," Pierre Wettach, the ICRC's head of delegation for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said. "The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded."

The ICRC accused the Israeli military of failing to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and remove the wounded, and called the delay in allowing rescue services access unacceptable.

The ICRC's charges were another setback for the Israeli military. On Tuesday it killed more than 40 people in a bomb attack on a UN school in the Gaza Strip that it claimed was being used by a Hamas mortar team, and international aid organisations say that its 13-day offensive is creating a humanitarian catastrophe among Gaza's 1.5 million residents.

The Israel Defence Forces did not respond directly to the charges, but issued a statement that it was battling a terrorist organisation — Hamas — that was deliberately using Palestinian civilians as human shields.

It said the IDF was working closely with international aid organisations during the fighting so that civilians could receive assistance, and continued: "The IDF in no way intentionally targets civilians and has demonstrated its willingness to abort operations to save civilian lives and to risk injury in order to assist innocent civilians.

Any serious allegations made against the IDF's conduct will need to be investigated properly, once such a complaint is received formally, within the constraints of the current military operation."

Israel's Finest

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Israel's Finest

Our finest young men are attacking Gaza now. Good boys from good homes are doing bad things. Most of them are eloquent, impressive, self-confident, often even highly principled in their own eyes, and on Black Saturday dozens of them set out to bomb some of the targets in our "target bank" for the Gaza Strip.

They set out to bomb the graduation ceremony for young police officers who had found that rare Gaza commodity, a job, massacring them by the dozen. They bombed a mosque, killing five sisters of the Balousha family, the youngest of whom was 4. They bombed a police station, hitting a doctor nearby; she lies in a vegetative state in Shifa Hospital, which is bursting with wounded and dead. They bombed a university that we in Israel call the Palestinian Rafael, the equivalent of Israel's weapons developer, and destroyed student dormitories. They dropped hundreds of bombs out of blue skies free of all resistance.

In four days they killed 375 people. They did not, and could not, distinguish between a Hamas official and his children, between a traffic cop and a Qassam launch operator, between a weapons cache and a health clinic, between the first and second floors of a densely populated apartment building with dozens of children inside. According to reports, about half of the people killed were innocent civilians. We're not complaining about the pilots' accuracy, it cannot be otherwise when the weapon is a plane and the objective is a tiny, crowded strip of land. Our excellent pilots are effectively bullies now. As in training flights, they bomb undisturbed, facing neither an air force nor defense system.

It is hard to judge what they are thinking, how they feel. It's unlikely to be relevant, anyway. They are measured by their actions. In any event, from an altitude of thousands of feet the picture looks as sterile as a Rorschach inkblot. Lock onto the target, press the button and then a black column of smoke. Another "successful hit." None see the effects on the ground of their actions. Their heads must surely be filled with Gaza horror stories - they themselves have never been there - as if there aren't a million and a half people living there who only want to live with a minimum of honor, some of them young like themselves, with dreams of studying, working, raising a family but who have no chance to fulfill their dreams with or without the bombing.

Do the pilots think about them, the children of refugees whose parents and grandparents have already been driven from their lives? Do they think about the thousands of people they have left permanently disabled in a place without a single hospital worthy of the name and no rehabilitation centers at all? Do they think about the burning hatred they are planting not only in Gaza but in other corners of the world amid the horrific images on television?

It was not the pilots who decided to go to war, but they are the subcontractors. The real accounting must be with the decision makers, but the pilots are their partners. When they return home they will be welcomed with all the respect and honor we reserve for them. It appears that not only will no one try to provoke moral questioning among them, but that they are considered the real heroes of this cursed war. The Israel Defense Forces spokesman is already going over the top with praise in his daily briefings for the "wonderful work" they are doing. He too, of course, completely ignores the images from Gaza. After all, these are not sadistic Border Police officers beating up Arabs in the alleys of Nablus and the center of Hebron, or cruel undercover soldiers who shoot their targets point-blank in cold blood. These, as we have said, are our finest young men.

Maybe if they were to confront the results of their "wonderful work" even once they would regret their decisions, they would reconsider the effects of their actions. If they were to go just once to Jerusalem's Alyn Hospital Pediatric and Adolescent Rehabilitation Center, where for nearly three years Marya Aman, 7, has been hospitalized - she is a quadriplegic who runs her wheelchair, and her life, with her chin - they would be shocked. This adorable little girl was hit by a missile in Gaza that killed almost her entire family, the handiwork of our pilots.

But all of this is well hidden from the pilots' eyes. They are only doing their job, as the saying goes, only following orders like bombing machines. In the past few days they have excelled at this, and the results are there for the entire world to see. Gaza is licking its wounds, just like Lebanon before it, and almost no one pauses for a moment to ask whether all this is necessary, or unavoidable, or whether it contributes to Israel's security and moral image. Is it really the case that our pilots return safely to base, or are they in fact returning to them as callous, cruel and blind people?

Gideon Levy

Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist for the Haaretz newspaper, where he is also an editorial board member. He is a prominent left-wing commentator. He formerly served as spokesman for Shimon Peres from 1978 and 1982.

The Gaza slaughter in pictures

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The Gaza slaugther in pictures (click)

Images of Lebanon back to haunt the world; courtesy of a killer rogue nation?

Ha ha! Bush the Artful Dodger

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Ha ha! Bush the Artful Dodger




See Knock-out Video here, click

Gabriele Zamparini
the Cat's Blog
December 15, 2008

When Muntazer al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist, shouted, "It is the farewell kiss, you dog" to Bush and threw him his shoes during a news conference in Baghdad, the curtain of hypocrisy fell and the ugly emperor stood naked in front of the world.

Those shoes however were not aimed only to a man who should be - by his own standards - hanged, together with his entire junta of mass murderers; the Iraqi hero hit to the face all those responsible for the Iraq genocide and its ongoing denial; an endless army of politicians, diplomats, generals, businessmen, journalists, intellectuals and pimps who've helped to carry out the crime of the century. Shoes for all!

Shoes for the United Nations that instead of protecting one of its members from the supreme international crime that organization has been founded to prevent, collaborated with the occupation and its crimes.

Shoes also for the lib-left intelligentsia, the anti-war movement's politburo, the human rights paladins and the court of eunuchs who have worked as gatekeeper of dissent and helped to sell the products of the crime of the century; the supporters of the "political process", of the sectarian Quisling government, of the militias of drillers and all those who rejoiced for the capture and lynching of Saddam Hussein and his government. Shoes for all!

Shoes for Human Rights Watch that contributed to the propaganda campaign that made possible the invasion of Iraq, rejoiced and praised the US occupation for the capture of its president and still keep denying the Iraq genocide.

Shoes for Iraq Body Count that's made possible the denial of the Iraq genocide by its perpetrators and their propaganda apparatus.

A shoe also for Juan Cole; in his Informed Comment blog the Western anti-war movement's icon and Middle East "expert" presented the al-Zaidi's heroic act juxtaposing two BBC articles:

If you search shoes and Iraq, here is how Google shows two BBC stories on December 14, five years apart (they came up together like this at the top of my search):

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Iraqis celebrate Saddam capture
Dec 14, 2003 ... women ululated and crowds beat pictures of Saddam with shoes. ... where the Saddam statue was toppled at the end of the war, ...
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3317637.stm - 46k

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Shoes thrown at Bush on Iraq trip
Dec 14, 2008 ... President Bush's farewell visit to Iraq is marred by an incident in which two shoes are thrown at him during a news conference.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7782422.stm - 8 hours ago

It's really a pity that Cole couldn't find a third BBC article about shoes on Google, The day Saddam's statue fell:

"Down, down, Saddam," said one man, frenziedly interrupting my piece to camera so we should see him use his shoe to repeatedly strike the face of the statue, which had come down a few moments earlier.

Of course in that case even Juan Cole should have explained (to) his readers that that event, the pulling down of Saddam Hussein's statue, was a staged media event organized by the US occupation and its stooges...

Appalling, even for Western propaganda's standards. Appalling but not surprising. It was Juan Cole after all who supported and then justified the vicious military campaign against Fallujah, "there were very bad characters there".

It was Juan Cole who helped to sell the lynching of the legitimate president of Iraq even a few hours before that horror show took place.

Appalling but not surprising; Juan Cole has always been biased against the Sunni Iraqi community and helped to sell his readers the New Iraq.

Back to the brave Iraqi journalist Montadhar Al-Zaydi; he has shown to the world the emperor is naked. He's been now taken hostage in his own country by the sectarian Quisling government of the Green Zone. Not only should he be released immediately; he must be honoured by any decent human being as a hero.

Condi Rice takes to her heels in Auckland

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Condi Rice takes to her heels in Auckland

There was chanting, speeches and an impressive US flag burning outside Government House where Rice was meeting with prime minister Helen Clark and foreign affairs minister Winston Peters. The speeches focused on Rice's support for the illegal and immoral war in Iraq, as well as the wider and more nonsensical 'War on Terror'; her sanctioning of torture and instrumental role in setting up Guantanamo Bay; and on what a bad idea a free trade agreement with the US would be. Then the crowd relocated to the Langham Hotel, where Rice met with leader of the parliamentary opposition, John Key.

Auckland University Students Association had to withdraw the bounty it placed on the head of Condoleezza Rice two days earlier, under threat of legal action. However, the students association at Victoria University in Wellington doubled the price, offering $10,000 for a successful citizen's arrest. Although several people turned up to the demo with handcuffs, the chance to nab Rice didn't present itself. Police refused to cooperate in the arrest of this war criminal, giving the irrelevant excuse that she is a visiting dignitary.

Police had planned to limit protest at the Langham hotel by keeping protesters on the opposite side of the road, behind shiny new barricades that had obviously been bought specially for the occasion. What they hadn't planned for was a busload of protesters being dropped off at the bus stop outside the hotel. After fifteen minutes of chanting and yelling by protestors, the police claimed that standing on the public footpath outside the hotel, was a 'safety risk.' When protesters refused to leave, the police violently forced them off the sidewalk and out onto the road. Protesters were shoved, punched and thrown to the street and pain compliance holds used on several protesters to get them to move. Several were punched in the face, including veteran activist John Minto who was shoved to the ground by several officers, smashing and breaking the megaphone he was chanting through. Two protesters were arrested and one man was left bleeding from the neck and wrist.

GW: The big bully of the class

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GW VIDEO: Nobody will shake hands with the big bully of the class

Yes we can, yes we did!

Yes we can, yes we did!

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Hey! That's my Ferrari!!

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Hey! That's my Ferrari!!

A mysterious blonde paid a visit to a petrol station shop in the small eastern German town of Doemitz on Sunday-wearing nothing but a pair of golden stilettos and a thin gold bracelet.

The tall, slender woman strolled into the shop in the town of Doemitz on the warm afternoon and bought cigarettes, petrol station employee Ines Swoboda told Reuters on Monday.

"I wasn't surprised because she's come in naked before -- she's a very nice woman," Swoboda said, adding none of the other customers were bothered. The woman could have faced charges of creating a public disturbance if anyone had complained.

A quick-witted customer did, however, snap pictures of the woman believed to be about 30 years old as she walked back to a waiting Ferrari and climbed into the passenger seat. Several of those photos appeared in the German media on Monday.

Between Tskhinvali and Tbilisi

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Between Tskhinvali and Tbilisi

TSKHINVALI, Georgia — It is not easy for Ireya Alborova to root through the events that cracked this city in half, but one small bright memory stands out from 1989, when she glanced at the building across the street from her high school and spotted a flag.
Ireya Alborova lived in Tskhinvali, in the South Ossetian enclave in Georgia, until 2001. She returned for a visit last month.

Ms. Alborova, talking with friends, grew up in a family of Georgians and Ossetians. Mixed families were common in Tskhinvali until the Soviet Union collapsed, and nationalism swelled.

It was a small Georgian flag, fixed in an attic window. Ms. Alborova was an unruly 15-year-old, preoccupied with her friends and her classes, and she took it in — a small piece of information — and kept walking. But now she thinks of it as the first signal of what was coming.

Most of the world now knows what happened: South Ossetians and Georgians began a drawn-out war to control this sleepy valley, where the main feature is a road that cuts through the Caucasian ridge into Russia. That flared into a global standoff last month, when Georgia pounded Tskhinvali, the capital of the South Ossetian enclave, with rocket fire and Russian troops poured across the border in response.

But for Ms. Alborova’s family, which is partly Georgian but wound up on the Ossetian side of the conflict, the crucial event took place during the last months of the Soviet Union, when the fabric of a multiethnic society tore apart with breathtaking speed. For the past 18 years, in a city encircled by Georgian positions, the family and its neighbors have been reliving the rifts and betrayals of that period.

Her Aunt Fuza’s neighbor, a Georgian woman, crossed ethnic lines to pass on a warning that an attack on Ossetians was planned — and then disappeared. A checkpoint appeared between Tskhinvali and her mother’s ancestral village, cutting the Alborovas off from their Georgian relatives. Construction suddenly halted on a huge supermarket being built near their apartment 18 years ago, and not a day’s work has been done since then.

Its foundation was eventually picked apart to build trenches. And the citizens of Tskhinvali became a resistance.

“It’s not a question of whether you choose to or not,” said Ms. Alborova, who is now 34 and lives in Toulouse, France. “Sometimes you are obliged. In some situations you don’t choose anything.”

Tskhinvali is a city of low-slung, sand-colored buildings suspended between urban and rural life. Roosters crow in the cool of the morning, and almost every house has its own grape arbor, used to make sweet pink wines that are stored in plastic soda bottles and brought out for the slightest occasion. There were also monumental Stalinist-era apartment buildings where the elite lived, and a grand neoclassical theater.

Ms. Alborova practically grew up in that theater. Her mother, Medeya, was Georgian. (Though her mother’s mother had been Ossetian, children in the Caucasus take their father’s ethnicity.) Medeya met Gelim Alborov in a state folk dancing troupe, and when they married in the 1970s, unions of Georgians and Ossetians were still unremarkable.

To a teenager’s eyes, the two ethnic groups were woven together inextricably. Children in Ms. Alborova’s class were given their choice of language for classroom use, and though most of them were Ossetian, 28 out of 32 opted to study Georgian.

“Our teacher was embarrassed,” Ms. Alborova said. “No one wanted to learn Ossetian.”

In the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, some 50 miles to the southeast, Georgia’s first post-Soviet leader was emerging. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a longtime anti-Soviet dissident, based his campaign for the presidency on a vaulting Georgian nationalism — an idea powerful enough to fill the vacuum left by Communism’s collapse.

The platform, known as Georgia for the Georgians, cast ethnic Georgians, who made up 70 percent of the population, as the country’s true masters. Mr. Gamsakhurdia derided South Ossetians as newcomers, saying they had arrived only 600 years ago and as tools of the Soviet Union.

On the street in Tskhinvali, small changes began to appear.



Ms. Alborova’s aunt was exasperated to go to the store and see that pasta manufactured in Russia had been put in packages labeled with Georgian script. Her neighbor Emma Gasiyeva kept hearing slogans: “Brush them out with a broom!” and “Who are the guests, and who are the hosts?” a reference to the theory that Ossetians had been brought to the area as agricultural workers.

In 1989, Ms. Alborova was 15, and she saw only shadows. She heard that her Georgian classmates were gathering for some kind of meeting, but she was not invited. “They stopped talking to us,” she said of her Georgian neighbors. “It was done very quickly.”

Over the next three years, Tskhinvali became something like Belfast in Northern Ireland.

The government in Tbilisi established Georgian as the country’s principal language, enraging the Ossetians, whose first two languages were Russian and Ossetian. A few months later, more than 10,000 Georgian demonstrators were transported to Tskhinvali in buses and encircled the city, until they were repelled by Ossetian irregulars and Soviet troops. A true war began in 1991, when thousands of Georgian soldiers entered Tskhinvali. The city was shelled almost nightly from the Georgian-held highlands, and Medeya Alborova recalls holding pillows over her teenage daughters’ heads, as if that could protect them.

When Mrs. Alborova got to Tbilisi to see her relatives, it was like stepping into a parallel universe. She sat with them watching news on Georgian television, as the announcer recited a litany of crimes committed by Ossetians against Georgians. At times, she said, she was not sure she was on the right side of the conflict.

But the years made all of them harder. Even after a cease-fire in 1992, Tskhinvali was isolated from the Georgian territory around it, and accounts of atrocities against Ossetians — rapes and grisly killings — circulated endlessly.

Mothers, who wield enormous power in this society, urged their sons to fight.

But Ms. Alborova found a way to leave, through a scholarship to study in France. She arrived in Toulouse in 2001 and took in the town with amazement; people were so focused on pleasure. She replayed her memories from Tskhinvali, sealed off from the bright world that surrounded her.

“I understood that I had lost 10 years of my life,” she said.

Ms. Alborova returned to Tskhinvali on Aug. 24 with butterflies in her stomach. She had expected physical damage, and it was there: bullet holes pockmarked virtually every building. But what surprised her were the people. Not many of them were left, and those who remained seemed damaged.

Soon after her return, Ms. Alborova was taken aback when a friend asked her if she could kill President Mikheil Saakashvili if he were standing in front of her. A family friend, who greeted Ms. Alborova affectionately on Karl Marx Street, turned icy when asked about Georgians.

“They have poison in their blood,” said the woman, Katya Kharebova, 60.

Many in Tskhinvali say they would welcome the return of their Georgian neighbors. Still, it is difficult to imagine how long it will be before these people will live together again, much less intermarry. When history sets down the consequences of what happened on Aug. 7, the death of a neighborhood will not be recorded.

Indeed, in 20 years, it may be hard to find Georgians and Ossetians in this area who can talk to each other at all. Ms. Alborova’s nieces, who live in Russia with her sister, are the first generation of her family that does not speak Georgian. Her mother shrugged, when asked about it.

“Who’s going to teach them?” she asked.